Blossburg Mayor Shane Nickerson isn’t exactly your typical mayor. He’s the host of Saturday Skates with the Mayor, a regular meeting of skateboarders at the local skatepark and he’s changing lives with his relationships and his skateboard manufacturing business.

Mayor Nickerson grew up skateboarding and he wanted to bring his hobby to his town. After a successful grant application to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, a skatepark was constructed and plenty of youngsters, especially teens, started showing up to skateboard.

But what the mayor found was that although the kids were interested in skateboarding, they often didn’t have the equipment to do it.

So Nickerson set out to find a solution and with the help of some friends, Mayor Skateboard Company, which is a skateboard factory in Blossburg, was born.

Nickerson tells the story, “I got a phone call from Country Ski and Sports in Montoursville and they were liquidating their skateboarding equipment. He said, ‘You want some decks?’ and I said, ‘Sure, I want everything!’ We would have Saturday Skateboarding with the Mayor and I’d invite some kids from the community to help give lessons to whoever came. We’d line the kids up and whoever was the youngest got to pick a free skateboard. We’d do that until all of the decks had been given out, from youngest to oldest. But the skateboard decks would get worn out over time and the kids would say, ‘Do you have any more skateboards?’ “

The mayor had a chat with his son to solve the dilemma, which led to an aha moment. “My son and I were talking one night and I said, “ You know what? People make these, let’s look it up online and see how they are made. Skateboards are basically glue and veneer, but you need a press. So, we found a press, drove to Massachusetts to buy it and we started making skateboards,” says the entrepreneurial mayor.

Not long after that, the company got a boost when one of the biggest names in skateboarding came to visit Blossburg. Ron Allen, one of the first African American pro skateboarders, had heard about Nickerson’s efforts and he offered to help get the factory moving forward.

Now Mayor Skateboard, using a custom-drawn logo by Allen, manufactures maple collector-level skateboards with screen-printed original graphics. They also manufacture other skateboards to pass on to kids at the skatepark.

Nickerson turns pensive and adds, “Skateboarding is really hard. It’s a sport you really have to earn. Every once in a while, there is a kid that just takes off and is just naturally talented but more often than not, you have to fail a thousand times before. With skateboarding you learn to look at things differently. You look at the perfect ledge, you count stairs…you start looking at things from a different angle.”

One day, Mayor Nickerson took a troubled kid to a local bridge to see it up close. Nickerson said to him, “Touch it, see it. We both see it’s a bridge.”

Then, they drove to the top of the mountain and looked down on that same bridge. Nickerson urged, “That’s the same bridge but you see how different it looks because of how we’ve positioned ourselves.” Nickerson pauses and then adds, “You gotta do that in life with everything. Look at things from a different angle. It makes you look at your community differently. There’s a whole new world out there to see differently.”